


Poland

by wreathed



Category: British Comedy RPF
Genre: Anal Sex, Butt Plugs, Cock Rings, Cock Warming, Gross, Hero Worship, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Porn, Rimming, Slapping, Submission, Watersports
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-26
Updated: 2017-12-26
Packaged: 2019-02-22 04:01:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13158864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wreathed/pseuds/wreathed
Summary: Sure, Chris's writing methods seem a little unorthodox, but who's Charlie to argue?





	Poland

This is _his_ office: a narrow converted townhouse on Poland Street. Charlie has been given a key to the building entrance. Four floors up, right in the roof. Charlie has to pause halfway up to let his smoker’s lungs catch breath.

He remembers how they met the first time.

*

Charlie never went to parties. He had only gone to this one because _he_ might be there, and he was, in this small telly people gathering at Gia Milinovich’s new place. He and Charlie talk and he’s surprisingly jovial, not what Charlie expected at all. He says he loves the TV Go Home pages that Gia emailed to him last month, and Charlie nearly folds to the floor in pleasure.

Then nothing much further happens for years after their first discussions on furthering Nathan Barley for television (on TV he’s a twat, not a cunt, they establish) until suddenly Chris Morris one day leaves a voicemail on Charlie’s answerphone to say OK, we’re writing it now, and as soon as he’s finished replaying the message four times Charlie has to fire up Doom 2 for a couple of hours just to calm down.

*

The stairwell is utterly silent. Charlie’s heart leaps into his mouth and stays there.

Time ticks on palpably as he waits. At last, he knocks on the door to the office.

Chris opens the door and he’s so close, somehow, to Charlie’s face. He’s looking at him, like… well, this must be it, Charlie thinks. The aforementioned-by-others laser focus. There’s a whiteboard on the wall already covered in blocks of story progression and characters with arrows coming out of them. Charlie thinks of all his last minute deadline scrambles over the years and flinches.

“What have you got?” Chris asks Charlie, and Charlie shuts the door behind him and then they talk.

*

They agree to write ten a.m. until eight p.m., Monday to Thursday, and Charlie will take off Fridays to write his Guardian column and Chris will take off Fridays to rearrange his taxidermy collection or spend time with his children or whatever other aggressively normal things he gets up to away from here.

It’s a more disciplined schedule than Charlie’s used to, but then he’s not really used to writing with other people. The 11 O’Clock Show had been more of a turn up and pitch kind of deal. At eight p.m. every day, no matter where they’re up to, Chris lifts his musty raincoat from the back of his chair and leaves on the dot. Yet Charlie knows from the emails he gets from him that Chris often stays up half the night, turning over everything in his brain.

*

It’s a stretch of July, eventually August, of close, muggy summer air and regular torrential downpours, squeezing London closer together in its teeming centre. You could always feel the sweat in the room.

Charlie’s mind wanders, even though it hadn’t been requested to. He can’t hear anything from the street up here. Is there soundproofing? He feels hermetically sealed in, it’s so hot and so quiet. There are windows, but Chris never opens them and he always keeps the blinds down. There’s a wet room off from the office, but Charlie has never been aware of Chris using it for any other reason than to relieve himself.

“It’s very warm in here,” Chris says on a particularly hot afternoon, his eyes still on his computers screen. “Are you comfortable? Do you want to take off your t-shirt?”

Charlie laughs nervously. He feels his underarms prickle. “If you're sure it won't be too weird. Will you?”

“I'm alright, thank you,” Chris says crisply, although there is sweat across his brow and under his arms.

It is a bit weird, and Charlie feels quite embarrassed just sitting there, all chest-y, but they carry on writing and he actually does soon forget about it.

On Thursday nights he’s spat back unceremoniously into the sunlight-bright ordinary world, where the only noise in his flat is the hum of his elderly fridge and people sometimes want to do things like shake his hand or ask him if he has any nice plans for the weekend. It’s a challenge, every time.

*

Sometimes they do a sort of sanity check on each other’s ideas. It reminds Charlie of when he got to work on Paeddagedon a bit, mostly with scripts posted back and forth in big brown envelopes, basically saying ‘yes, that’s a great idea’ to everything Chris came up with that was brilliant, which was pretty much all of it.

Chris is talking.

“That sounds great,” Charlie says. “No problem with that; it fits in well.”

Chris then goes onto something else, something similar. A model who Barley thinks is underage, but turns out not to be. It’s familiar territory. 

“Yeah, that'd be fucking hilarious. As long as we could do it, as long as we'd be allowed. But I'm sure you can sort it.”

Chris grins.

The next thing Chris mentions, a new character who writes for the Times and is trying to infiltrate SugaRape magazine, Charlie isn’t so sure about. It seems to pull focus from Dan Ashcroft being the informed outsider. But Charlie thinks: he can’t be the one who’s right. Chris has been incredible throughout this entire project. 

“Yeah, sounds good,” Charlie says, in the same tone as he normally uses. What does he know? They should at least try it?

“I was giving you a deliberately shit idea,” Chris says, and Charlie tries not to let his relief show, just as he also feels his blood run cold over the trip-up.

“I'm not trying to catch you out – I promise not to do that again. But you're not my yes-man, Charlie. That's not why you're here. You've pitched plenty of times by now, yes?”

“I suppose so. Although, not really. And there was that meeting where I hadn’t prepped and just came out with inarticulate _sounds_ , or that time I brought a double-sided script sample when it should have been single-sided– ”

“What I think, Charlie,” Chris says, getting up from his desk to start to walk towards him. “Is that you need to relax.”

“Um,” Charlie says, feeling suddenly very aware of how Chris is now standing in front of him in a looming sort of way, especially because Charlie’s still sitting down, and how Chris is now less than a foot away from him. “I need a cigarette, is what I need; can I smoke in here? Can I just grab one, give me a moment– ”

“Stay here,” Chris says, very firm and very sure, looking down at him, and places one hand on Charlie’s shoulder, exerting just enough pressure to keep him seated.

Charlie hears himself give out the tiniest possible breath. They both look at each other for innumerable seconds. Charlie keeps his eyes open, without blinking. He swears that, at one point, Chris’s eye twitches.

They are gathering courage.

“Stay sitting down,” Chris says at last, and Charlie… stays sitting there. _Obeys_ him. It’s a happily simple instruction to follow.

“I’d rather you didn’t smoke in my office, thank you,” Chris says quietly, and after a moment more he places a hard, accurate slap across Charlie’s face.

Charlie feels his skin sting, his eyes grow damp. He looks up at Chris and, oh. _Oh._

Then Chris turns away, goes to sit down at his desk and types without so much as glancing at Charlie for the next ten minutes.

It’s too awkward to mention that Charlie spends that time blood-rushing-from-everywhere hard, but there’s still the fact that he definitely _is_ to deal with all of a sudden, and he’s not sure whether he’s pleased or not that Chris doesn’t appear to notice.

“You can get up now, Charlie,” Chris smiles at eight o’clock, as he heads out the door, but Charlie waits just that bit longer for the adrenaline to spike back down before he stands up and goes home.

*

He sleeps for most of the weekend, and dreams of being in a small room and not being able to move at all. Nothing holding himself there but himself.

Chris is there. But it’s not like Charlie’s usual claustrophobia. He doesn’t wake up in a cold sweat, he wakes up feeling peaceful.

He also keeps waking up hard, but he writes it off as over-eager morning wood and tries to ignore it. In the dreams, he’s stock still, and Chris is standing very close to him, but he can’t seem to imagine what happens next.

*

“You need to relax,” Chris says again a few days later, and Charlie’s mind, addled from the weekend, immediately jumps to some porn he’d once watched (against his better judgement) where the man had said the same thing to the girl he was casting and oh god, that’s not what Chris meant. Why did his stupid mind go straight there?

He can feel his cock starting to harden and, mortified, his body stiffens and he feels frozen to the sofa.

“This isn’t about your body, it’s about your brain,” Chris says carefully, holding one end of his pen thoughtfully up against his bottom lip. “I need to get you in some kind of state where you’ll be able to tell me whatever comes into your head. Can you think about how I might do that?”

His voice is so dangerous, like this, in its well-spoken mild mannered tone.

“I don’t know,” Charlie says around a dry swallow.

“What I want you to do now is stand up and take your clothes off for me.”

Charlie’s eyes dart to the computer, to the room’s corners. He’s still thinking about pornography. “Is there a camera?”

If Chris is caught off-guard, he doesn’t show it.

“Yes,” Chris says in a tight, precise voice. “Try to forget about it.”

“OK,” Charlie says, as his breathing elevates. _Jesus. Jesus._ His dick feels like iron.

He takes his clothes off in a hurry, to get it over with, grimacing as he pulls his trousers and boxers down over his aching erection. Then he sits back down again.

“Are you going to– “ Charlie, completely naked, face blushing furiously, gesticulates vaguely with one hand. “Take off your clothes too?”

“I don’t see why I need to,” Chris says, firm but completely off-hand. His voice has gone closer to Christopher Morris, Brass Eye and The Day Today and On the Hour presenter Chris that Charlie had first listened to long before they had met, 20 years old, with his eyes closed so he could catch every word coming from the radio, and for some reason it scrambles his brain and he feels gone _under_ , he feels desperate for any scrap of anything Chris, the stupid fucking genius, will deign to give him.

“Keep your legs apart,” Chris says, looking down at his computer screen. “Put your hands on your knees.” Charlie obeys instantly, and waits.

Then Chris spends a few minutes typing something. Charlie hears his own breathing sounding alarmingly loud as he sits there, all naked with his skin looking terrible in this light and _Jesus_.

“How do you think we should open episode two?” Chris then asks him and, shocked into compliance, Charlie doesn’t even question it, just tries to answer the question even with blood roaring through him.

*

Charlie thinks about flinging ideas out to Annabel, and the way she sometimes screws up her face and says _that is fucking horrible, Charlie, even for you_.

Chris never does that.

*

He should be wanking every night – that’s what he’d do most of the time anyway – and probably for a lot of the weekend, such is the sexual frustration that’s building up within him, but he doesn’t do it. It takes him a long time to work out why, but eventually he realises it’s because he hasn’t been given permission to. Working with Chris is a privilege, and this is his process, how unorthodox it might be.

Still, Charlie thinks as he waits in the bathroom for yet another hard-on to go down, he’s got to find the courage this week, somehow, to ask Chris about it.

* 

“Do you want to play a game?” Chris asks jauntily, as if he’s asking Charlie if he fancies a doughnut from the shop next door.

“What, like a writing game?” Charlie looks around wildly, eventually finding the television. “You don’t have a PS2 up here, do you?”

Chris smiles tightly, almost indulgently. “Not that kind of game,” he says.

First of all, it involves Charlie’s clothes coming off again. Chris hasn’t so much as touched him, Charlie thinks bitterly, ever since the slap, and that had been weeks ago.

Then they start writing again – Chris at the desk and doing the typing, Charlie doing most of the babbling. Eventually he spits out something Chris deems acceptable about funny things the characters could be saying at a magazine meeting.

“We’ll have that,” Chris says. “Great job, Charlie. “You can put one of your socks back on.”

They continue in this vein for some time and Charlie feels particularly on display. Why his ridiculous mutterings and flabby body inspired anyone, like he was a fucking _muse_ or something…

But then, he thought, Chris isn’t doing most of the legwork here. It’s the motivation of fear. Or adrenaline, or _something_.

“If you’re not able to come up with something soon, you’re going to leave this room with no t-shirt,” Chris says, his voice cutting through the stuffy space. “Be grateful you’ve already earned back your jeans. How would you like everyone to be looking at you?” Chris continues, sounding both dangerous and sincere, and Charlie’s stomach turns over as he digs his fingertips into his thighs, imagining it. An unworkable thought: Chris leaving with him, one arm around his waist to gently guide him onwards, a slew of scandalised shoppers running their observant, critical eyes over Charlie – who would be half naked and dishevelled, smelling of his own precome – and Chris pulling him protectively closer.

Taking it outside of this room makes it all seem like an impossible fever dream. Charlie lets the image in his mind fall away.

They carry on. It’s nearly eight o’clock. Charlie has earned back all of his clothes. It’s a Thursday night, and he still has to write something completely different and non-insane tomorrow. He feels wrung out.

“Are you ever going to let me… ” Charlie begins to say, just before Chris leaves. It’s now or never, at least for this weekend. “I mean, Jesus, are you ever going to let me come?”

“You haven’t yet? At home?”

Charlie shakes his head.

“Oh _Charlie_ ,” Chris says, and he sounds so pleased; Charlie feels a warm glow spread out from his heart to his fingertips. “No wonder you’re always ready to go off like a fucking tripwire. You can when we’ve finished the series. I can’t stop you on your own time, of course, but now I’ll know if you do. So I wouldn’t recommend it. I know I can trust you.”

And Charlie lets out a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding.

*

He’s going to be late. He’s going to be late.

He’s never been late for Chris before, but he has a feeling he won’t be impressed.

Charlie runs up the stairs, panting, his heart thudding. He feels in a state of acute pressure.

“Oh, there you are,” Chris says when Charlie bursts through the office door.

“I’m so sorry,” Charlie manages to say between pants, running a hand through his sweaty hair.

“It’s alright,” says Chris, running his eyes up and down Charlie in a way that makes his heart worry and soar all at once. “Calm down. I want quiet today,” Chris says. “I want quiet to think.”

“Alright,” Charlie says, his shoulders sagging in disappointment. “No problem. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“No.” Chris says.

“Sorry?”

“Stay.”

“OK. But what do you want– ”

“Get on your knees and stay. If you put your mouth to good use and remain completely still for an hour, I might get you off.”

A lot of feelings rush through Charlie at once. He feels pathetically grateful. As well as just pathetic.

He gets under Chris’s desk and eagerly unfastens Chris’s trousers. They’re safe up here. Chris isn’t hard, so Charlie takes him in his mouth and sits there quietly, obediently, in this dark warm little space.

Charlie hasn’t held one position like this before, but he find it focuses him. He lets his mind wander nowhere in particular, off the hook for the day. All he can hear is the sound of Chris typing on his iMac. Sometimes Chris gets hard, until that eventually fades away again. The urge to suck him off when Charlie feels him hardening in his mouth is overwhelming. Charlie has to ignore his own erection too, but he’s more used to that by now. He keeps his palms flat and still on the carpeted floor. He takes in the smell, the taste, the fullness, how his mouth floods and spit strings from his chin, how he can’t talk like this at all.

After, Charlie supposes, one hour, although he doesn’t really know how much time has passed, and feels as if Chris could have kept him like this for however long he’d wanted to, Chris clears his throat.

“That’s my edits finished,” Chris says. He moves back on his swivel chair and carefully removes his half-hard cock from Charlie’s mouth. Charlie, so used to his position, does not close his mouth straight away, and is acutely aware of his greedy spit stringing from his lips as Chris moves back.

“Can you sit on the edge of the desk?” Chris says, and Charlie hits his head on the underside of the desk in his haste to comply. At last, at _last_.

“You certainly deserve… something,” Chris says, almost softly, and (with some difficulty, due to having to work around Charlie’s insistent erection), unfastens and pulls down Charlie’s jeans.

He grasps Charlie’s cock in his hand and starts to move, and Charlie feels as if he’s going to float up to the ceiling he’s so happy.

Then the thud down to earth comes.

“I’m only going to carry on doing this,” Chris says dangerously, so close to Charlie’s ear. “If you give me some decent ideas.” Charlie grits his teeth and _whines_ , pushing up into Chris’s fist. Chris can’t stop this now, he can’t. Charlie stutters something out, but it’s not quite words. Chris starts to slow his hand down, and Charlie panics.

“Cocaine! We could work on all the cocaine stuff,” Charlie says, and Chris doesn’t take his hand away.

“Keep going,” Chris says. “But don’t come.”

Charlie doesn’t know how long he stays on this knife-edge, but he thinks of nothing but Chris and what they’re working on together.

“I’m about to come,” Charlie says eventually. “Please.”

“Actually, I was going to let you come,” Chris says, looking right at him. “But seeing as you warned me so nicely…”

Charlie pushes back into his now-unmoving hand, and groans. Pathetic, pathetic.

“You like anything that makes you feel sick and lost,” Christopher-Morris-on-Brass-Eye sneers, a voice that’s enough to make Charlie’s skin feel too tight for his body, yet it’s still not as overwhelming as when Chris speaks without a character in his voice at all. “Don’t you.”

“Takes one to know one,” Charlie says, like he’s fucking ten years old or something, but he feels something stab through him as he watches Chris flinch. He made him do that. It makes him ache to feel that same satisfied pleasure from making Chris come. He’s still never seen Chris come.

“Touch me,” Charlie says, pushing down the resultant embarrassment. “Hit me again. Please.”

“I don’t know whether you’re supposed to want that,” Chris says, but he could have been talking about either of them.

*

After that, something happens between them regularly enough that Charlie starts to anticipate it. It becomes the new normal. He starts getting hard just from climbing up to the office, wondering how he’s going to be driven mad today, to the point of being concerned he’s going to have a Pavlovian reaction if there’s ever anywhere else he has to go up four flights of stairs with a beige carpet. 

*

Chris always goes out to get them sandwiches for lunch.

“I could go, if you like?” Charlie asks one day, feeling pleasantly buzzed from all the fucking around with him Chris has done this morning (his penknife, close to Charlie’s skin but no blood drawn, had made Charlie tremble) and in a helpful mood.

“I don't trust you to get me the right thing,” Chris says. 

“You like control over all of your projects, don't you?” Charlie calls out as Chris is slamming the office door closed behind him. 

That's the closest they ever get to discussing it.

*

On Chris’s return, he takes out the penknife again, and Charlie's insides jump at the thought of the small blade running across his skin, making him stay stock still, but instead Chris uses it to cut Charlie’s sandwich into squares 

Then he gets Charlie to kneel at his feet, and feeds each small square to him over the course of the afternoon. It’s toe-curlingly humiliating, and yet Charlie feels cared for at each gentle touch of Chris’s fingers around his mouth as he is fed piece after piece.

*

It’s sitting there on the desk, a ludicrous sight. Out of its packaging, but Chris literally must have just gone out and bought it, popped out to one of the tacky sex shops two streets over, pulled a baseball cap over his hair and worn an especially shabby jacket to try and fit in better with the sort of clientele that generally shuffled in and out, especially at ten a.m. on a Wednesday.

“It looks very big,” Charlie says uncertainly.

“You can take it,” Chris says a little unpleasantly, with a tight, sudden smile.

“What if I don’t want to?” Charlie says around a swallow, hearing the shake in his voice just as he feels his cock start to show serious signs of interest.

“Alright,” Chris shrugs. “That’s not a problem. We won’t bother with today then. See you tomorrow.”

“No,” Charlie says, fists clenched. “Wait.”

“We both know, Charlie,” Chris says, and he smirks again. “You can write very well, but only if you’re nice and relaxed and full and preoccupied enough not to have the brain capacity to censor yourself. So what’s it going to be?”

“Will you do it?” Charlie asks, almost begs. Pathetic.

“I had hoped to film you putting it in yourself, inch by inch,” Chris says, and he can’t miss how saying that gives Charlie a pleasant, full body shiver. “But perhaps that’s a little too much to ask.”

“Why don’t you film yourself putting it in me?”

“I don’t like seeing myself on camera, you know that,” Chris says, and Charlie tries to hold his mouth shut but, he can’t help it, he laughs, his very stupidest gurning laugh. It makes Chris do one of his little smiles again.

Charlie thinks about Chris reviewing such footage of him, and his face burns with shame. A thought pops into his head of Chris opening his editing software and cutting it down – Chris is such a good editor, has great instincts – and idea of it makes Charlie smile. Chris is talented enough that maybe he could make even Charlie look good. Charlie knows he should want it all to be wiped – the idea that Chris will keep it on file afterwards seems like a ludicrous notion – but he likes the idea of a part of him sticking around even after their project is finished.

Chris actually takes his time with Charlie, gently pulling off his trousers, then bending him over and slowly filling him with more and more cool lubricant, added with the intimate touch of Chris’s two, three, four fingers. When Charlie at last feels the tip of the plug at his hole, he starts to panic, but Chris strokes his clean hand down Charlie’s back and starts shushing him like he’s an animal who needs to be calmed.

When it’s in to the base, Chris pulls Charlie up, pulls up his boxers back up and gets him to sit down on the sofa. Charlie groans. He’s not sure how he’s meant to be able to write, come up with jokes – he’s so full he can barely _breathe_. Every time he shifts in his seat, however restrained, he feels it rub up against his insides in a way that makes him want to give out some embarrassingly strange noise of pleasure.

It’s only a t-shirt and his underwear he’s wearing. Somehow the huge tented erection he has in his boxer shorts feels even more explicit than if he’d been naked.

Charlie’s not entirely sure of the productivity effectiveness in play this time. He definitely makes some edit suggestions, although he wouldn’t be able to tell anyone whether or not they were any good. He can’t stop thinking about how full and dirty and turned on he feels all day; it’s inescapable. Chris’s eyes, warm and critical, flick straight to him every time he shifts himself on the plug. It makes Charlie simultaneously want to stay very still and move himself on it even more.

They don’t talk about it at all, but occasionally throughout the day Chris comes over, smoothly tells Charlie to turn around and bend over, and adds more lube so Charlie doesn’t get too dry. It’s maddening: Chris gets a finger, somehow, inside him next to the plug, making Charlie feel impossibly fuller. Then there’s the squelch of the lube that Chris hasn’t warmed up first that he feels, unable to see anything because his face is buried in the sofa, and all the time his cock is ignored, the friction of it trapped between him and the sofa when he’s bent over like this not enough to make him come. 

Chris pushes the plug all the way back in again with the heel of his palm pressing into the base, and Charlie gives out a guttural groan. Then Charlie is pulled upright to a sitting position again, his face red, his vision a little teary. That makes Chris smile, too. 

After so much practice, he meets the challenge of endurance, although there are practical considerations. Going to piss is difficult. He has to think of horrible things to get his cock down enough to go.

Chris looks at him a lot that day, less inscrutable than usual. Charlie can tell that it’s turning Chris on, that Charlie’s being so compliant, that Charlie’s having to shuffle back from the bathroom holding the plug in with his hand as he walks, erection already filling out again, each step taken gingerly. It spurs Charlie on.

At eight p.m. Chris rises up to leave, usual time. Charlie doesn’t move.

“You did so well today, Charlie,” Chris says, looking right at him. “We don’t need to tweak this episode much further, I think. I’m proud of you.”

For a moment, he blinks, and looks as if he’s going to say something further; a rare hesitation. But then he leaves as usual, just as abruptly as ever.

He’s left Charlie alone to deal with the practicalities. The urge to fuck himself on the plug and come is overwhelming, but after biting down on his cheek for a few moments to try and calm down, he manages to slowly slide the plug out of himself. He feels empty once it’s gone.

He takes a shower on the coldest setting he can stand, then washes the plug in the sink. Then the situation becomes ridiculous – he’s standing alone, naked, in Chris’s office – where is he going to put the damn thing? After one more very careful clean, he settles eventually for placing it in the carrier bag it came in, and then in one of Chris’s desk drawers. 

He chooses the bottom one. Right at the back, there are a few condoms, and Charlie’s stomach flips at the thought of, one day, getting some use out of them. 

It’s getting late. He jams the drawer shut, and leaves.

*

It races around in his head, what a mutual friend once told him. Chris doesn’t know when to stop. Doesn’t know when to stop. Doesn’t know–

There’s a new request that Chris throws out one day. Charlie’s having a bad day, fidgeting, not always listening, and Chris looks as if he desperately wants to shake Charlie out of it, but instead he asks him to strip and kneel on the tiled floor of the wet room, with his legs spread either side of the drain. Charlie feels himself getting hard just at the thought of his own keen obeying, just at the knowledge that he’s letting this be done to him, that he’s letting this happen.

Charlie closes his eyes as he feels the hot, acrid-smelling stream hit his chest and run down his torso, then over his dick, before dripping down to the floor between his splayed thighs.

“Keep your eyes open,” Chris says.

Charlie opens them.

To his vague horror, he’s still getting harder, at the sound of Chris’s commanding voice, at the objectification of him so that he may as well be just a part of the tiled floor.

“I value your contributions, Charlie,” Chris says once he’s finished, and then he leaves the room so that Charlie can shower.

Charlie feels very calm after that. Like there’s no other self-consciousness left beneath all the hot, roiling-boil shame he feels over being so degraded, and so he talks and talks and he presumes Chris writes the best stuff down.

* 

He always feels like he’s run ten miles after seeing Chris, and comes home exhausted. He’s never run ten miles, so the feeling’s assumed. The endorphins whizz around him like ball bearings in a pinball machine.

But one thing’s for sure: it’s nothing like how he felt during the days of smoking weed all day and watching the TV on its side. Nothing like that at all.

*

Their final writing day comes quite suddenly. The weather forecast is for warm thunderstorms.

The last day. In the back of his mind, Charlie is hopeful, but his fluttering heart still sinks as he climbs the stairs for the final time.

“I’ve got you a present,” Chris says when Charlie closes the office door behind him.

“Oh. I haven’t got you anything,” Charlie says, a bit stupidly.

Chris looks as if he’s going to smile, but then looks put-upon instead.

“Open the box,” Chris says.

Charlie opens it.

“Just a bit of extra help,” Chris says.

It’s a cock ring. Plain black, made of silicone.

“Should I put it on now?” Charlie asks.

“Let’s just sit down and finish those final edits first,” Chris says, almost kindly. Charlie takes his usual place on Chris’s large sofa and they chat around the latest alterations to the series they’re deciding on. Charlie is fully clothed. At some point, Chris toes off his shoes. It feels almost normal, and that means it doesn’t feel normal for them anymore. It reminds Charlie a little of how they were when they first started, except the strange tension that was present then has gone, replaced by an entirely different sort.

He’s distracted. He keeps looking over to the box on Chris’s desk all day, and Chris must notice he’s doing it. 

Eventually, most of their desired tweaks are finished, and Charlie manages to convince Chris (or so he manages to tell himself) that any further changes will be made in consultation with the actors, or on the fly.

Chris goes to the bathroom, leaving Charlie ample pause to wait on the sofa and listen to his own breathing rate increase steadily.

“OK, Charlie,” Chris says. “You can put it on now.”

Charlie fumbles open his own jeans. He has to look skywards and count backwards from ten to get himself soft enough to put the damn thing on. 

Chris looks at Charlie like that for a moment – jeans and boxers pushed down to his knees, his erection even harder and darker than usual – and Charlie burns both with his own need and the desire to see Chris come undone too.

Then Chris kneels in front of Charlie, and takes off Charlie’s trainers, socks, jeans and underwear. Then, without further preamble, he pushes Charlie back against the sofa and licks the rim of Charlie’s hole. Charlie nearly jumps out of his skin, and then groans in overtaken pleasure.

They stay like that for some time, Chris between his thighs – there is a lot of spit making everything slick – and Charlie feels as if his mind is going to melt away. It’s been so long, he’s fairly sure if it hadn’t been for the ring he would have already come. There was method in Chris’s madness.

Chris makes Charlie gasp, scramble to grab onto the sofa, clamp down on either side of Chris’s face with his thighs. It’s not just his tongue _inside_ him, which is amazing, but also how much attention is being lavished solely on him after weeks of careful rationing of praise.

Eventually, far too soon, Chris pulls away, short of breath.

“What do you want, Charlie?” Chris says, looking up at him. Chris wipes some of the spit away from his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Please fuck me,” Charlie says.

“Take your t-shirt off,” Chris says. “It will look better.”

He’s filming this as well, Charlie realises, and feels dizzy at the thought of there being footage of this, password-protected somewhere in the depths of Chris’s computer, but nevertheless: some evidence that is undeniable.

“You take it off,” Charlie says, smiling.

Chris slaps him then, once, on one of his arse cheeks. Charlie grunts as his cock jerks, and he feels some of Chris’s spit dribble out of him. Then Chris pulls off Charlie’s t-shirt, throwing it on the floor. 

“Stay like that,” Chris says. “Don’t touch yourself.”

Charlie does so, feeling a little stupid, legs bent at the knee and dangling in the air, arse exposed and pink where it stings on one side from Chris’s hand. He leaves his hands obediently either side of him, not touching his cock where it sits heavy and damp on his stomach.

Chris comes back with lubricant already on his fingers and a condom packet in his hand. Just the sight makes Charlie’s breathing hitch. Chris has unbuttoned the waistband of his trousers and Charlie can see, with a cheap thrill, a large bulge in Chris’s underwear, but he still can’t see everything, and Chris is still without his shoes but otherwise remains fully dressed.

Chris’s fingers go inside Charlie, who is already wet from Chris’s earlier attentions and pliable from the weeks of waiting, and Charlie can’t help but try and shift himself deeper onto Chris’s fingers, desperate for more. He feels like Chris could go straight in right now – he couldn’t be bigger than that plug he made Charlie take for him – but Chris keeps him on edge like this for a while longer, just with his fingers and laser-focussed attentive to his task, and Charlie doesn’t have the brain capacity to stop himself from moaning over and over again, desperate to be filled and to come.

“You’re pathetic, Charlie,” Chris says, putting a bit more poshness into his voice than usual as he deepens the splay of his fingers. “Pathetic and desperate for it.”

“I’m going to come,” Charlie says hysterically, urging back the overwhelming feeling inside of him, looking down at his straining, leaking dick. “Not– l don’t want to come yet. You have to fuck me first.”

“It’s OK, Charlie,” Chris says softly, withdrawing his fingers. With his clean hand, he runs his fingers down the back of Charlie’s head, through his hair. “You’re not going to yet. Just relax.”

Charlie focuses on Chris’s voice and his own rate of breathing until he feels the orgasm he was right on the edge of begin to fade away.

“Please,” he says, unscrewing his eyes open and looking right at Chris.

Chris’s fingers again, briefly, then the sound of a condom going on, and at last the exquisite pressure of Chris pushing himself deep inside Charlie. They are both breathing hard.

Charlie groans, tries to push himself deeper onto Chris’s cock, and it seems that’s enough of a cue for Chris to pull out and slam himself all the way into Charlie. Charlie groans again. Chris’s hands grip tightly around Charlie’s legs, and Charlie feels the fabric of the opened waistband of Chris’s trousers brush against his sensitised skin every time Chris thrusts into him.

Charlie lets his eyes open and close as he feels like it, letting it all happen. He’s not able to see Chris properly like this: just his hair, his head bowed down, then the rest of his sightline is Charlie’s own legs. Chris is still wearing most of his clothes, but the points where they are skin-to-skin – palms wrapped around legs, the point at which they are joined – feel electric. 

Charlie’s toes flex as he feels orgasm start to ebb towards him once more. If he could just touch himself for one moment; Chris still hasn’t come, but in the moment Charlie didn’t care, he just thinks of his own longed-for release.

Charlie cries out in frustration as Chris slowly pulls out of him, but is gratified to see Chris himself is panting.

“Stand up,” Chris says after a couple of seconds’ pause for thought, and Charlie gathers himself and does so, onto shaky legs. If Chris stops everything now, he might be driven irrevocably mad.

Chris pushes his own trousers to his knees and lies down with his head on one arm of the sofa, so that he is facing the door.

Then, Chris gestures to his own erection with an incline of his head, and Charlie has to bite down on the inside of his mouth at the sight. Carefully, Charlie sits astride Chris so that he’s looking down at him.

“Do you want me to– ”

“Just make sure you’re facing this way,” Chris grits out. “But don’t look directly at the camera. Ruins it.”

Desperate to come, Charlie slowly shifts himself onto Chris’s cock and fills himself with it over and over again. He can finally see Chris clearly like this, and he looks down at Chris the whole time, and Chris doesn’t take his eyes off Charlie.

He’s tight around Chris’s cock, and listens hard, taking great pleasure in the pleasure he’s causing, as Chris’s quiet grunts get steadily louder.

Charlie’s cock feels the heaviest it's ever been, the ring still encircling the base of his dick, and he’s even more aware of it now as he bounces up and down on top of Chris. He feels very exposed like this, his whole body in Chris’s sightline and on camera, and it makes his flushing skin redden further.

Chris’s hands clench together but he gives no further warning; with a deep, dark sound, Chris comes, and Charlie watches every second of it. At last he has made Chris lose control, if only for a moment. It makes him feel warm all over.

Charlie catches his breath, panting hard. He stopped moving once Chris had come, but Chris hasn’t pulled out. All he can feel is the warm weight of his own cock. Charlie can feel the strain from it; he’s exhausted. Now, surely, Chris must take pity on him, but in Charlie’s mind he knows he still doesn’t really deserve it.

Chris’s eyes refocus properly, then he reaches up. He only pulls on Charlie’s cock a couple of times, but that’s all he needs. Charlie whimpers, wondrously grateful. 

“Pathetic,” Chris says quietly, almost kindly, giving Charlie’s cock another squeeze, and Charlie at last feels the tension in his body dissipate as he comes in a powerful rush that makes him cry out. A small amount of his come gets on Chris’s shirt, but most splashes upwards onto his own chest.

Afterwards he slumps back, spent, and Chris pulls out of him, knotting the condom and pulling up his trousers so that he is fully dressed once more. Charlie sees Chris let his gaze drift over Charlie, naked and covered in his own come. Charlie slips off the cock ring absent-mindedly.

“Good luck,” Chris says, his hand tentatively reaching forward and momentarily resting on the back of Charlie’s head. He holds out a box of tissues that was on his desk with his other hand. Charlie is free to go. 

He takes the tissues and half-heartedly wipes himself down, dresses quickly, even though he knows he reeks of sex and will stay that way on the tube home, but his treacherous heart leaps at the idea of his body remaining so for as long as possible.

The last day. That’s it. Sure, they’ll get to make the thing, which will be fantastic, but it won’t be like this. They’ll be other people – loads of people, producers and cameramen and set designers and runners, and actors who will be awe of Chris too, but not like Charlie is.

“I think we’ve got something good here,” Chris said, gesturing towards the script print-out on his desk.

“Yeah,” Charlie says, looking around the room and not knowing what else to say.

“Bye,” Chris says, the same way he always does, but this time and only this time it’s Charlie leaving first.

*

Charlie stares at his laptop screen. It’s two a.m.. He’s in his living room, alone.

 _You should do a one off Brexit Brass Eye!_ he types into the email draft.

He looks at the email, sighs, then removes the exclamation mark and replaces it with a full stop.

He finishes the rest of the paragraph and writes a whole other one after that, but he barely registers what’s in there. It’s just rounding out the fanmail. To a talented writer, it will be transparently extraneous wording.

Chris’s reply, despite the time, is almost instantaneous. No, he says to Brexit Brass Eye, citing other commitments and the difficulty of satirising the present day.

 _Do you want to write with me again?_ is the next line of the email, as if asking it is nothing at all.

Charlie’s hands shake as he starts to type his response. He never quite manages to send it.

*

“Congratulations on the win, Charlie,” Chris is saying over the phone, across the Atlantic. He sounds proud, genuinely pleased, and Charlie lets that feeling wash over him with a deep thrill of achievement. He’s not drunk anymore, but he’s high on the buzz of applause and admiration, and still shocked, overwhelmed, imposter syndrome rattling around inside him. But it’s starting to sink in now.

“Thank you,” Charlie says, in a rush of breath. “Emmy win! Me! Emmys win, actually, we got two–”

“I think you probably deserve a big reward,” Chris says, and Charlie feels the beginnings of sweat. His breathing gets faster. He wants to laugh, but knows the urge is worth fighting. Chris is very particular about when it’s the right time to laugh.

“You’ll need to practice carrying them around,” Chris continues. “A statue in each hand, at parties. I saw the footage of you, giving interviews, holding them both, looking like a deer in the headlights.”

“I probably looked like the world’s biggest twat– ”

“I see you with a hand around each and on your knees,” Chris says softly. “You were always very good with just your mouth.”

 _Fuck._ Charlie feels his hair prickle at the roots and he’s thirty three years old again, right back in that room.

“Do you want to write with me again?” Chris is saying. 

“It’s been a while,” Charlie manages to say, his tongue in his mouth feeling thick and dumb.

“It may seem a while to you,” Chris says. “But I watch back my favourite footage of you as often as I like.”

Charlie can’t help it, although he doesn’t mean to do it: his mouth falls open and he moans, a desperate, needy sound, right down the phone.

“My office, straight after you’ve come off the plane.”

Charlie does laugh then: awkwardly, half-heartedly. “I’ll be a jet-lagged, dead-eyed zombie.”

“I’m not interested in waiting much longer, Charlie,” Chris says, voice pitched lower, and it makes Charlie shiver.

“I’ll be there,” Charlie says, swallows heavily, and then hangs up.


End file.
